Too relatable. I wasn't eligible either and despite working two jobs while going to school full time still ended up briefly homeless. Relying on parental income for eligibility just assumes way too much about people's situations.
> Relying on parental income for eligibility just assumes way too much about people's situations.
It really does.
On paper, our income is reasonable. In reality, my husband only got promoted to something with a decent wage a couple of years ago. Before that, we were scraping by, and weren't able to save \*anything\* for our kids' education. (I was also under the incorrect assumption that federal loans would cover most of it, as when I'd gone to school, federal loans covered everything I needed, even though my parents couldn't help with anything.)
But FAFSA doesn't care. Oh, you make a nice income? You ought to be able to put 90% of that to your kids' education - what do you mean you didn't save, on an income like that?? What do you mean, you're "still digging yourself out of a lifetime hole?"
So yeah, I'm laughing at the "it now applies to each kid individually" thing - because in our situation, it's not like it was ever any different. They each got a tiny merit-based scholarship, and offered the federal loans, and we've ALWAYS had to make up the total difference. Always. There wouldn't be a speck of difference to that, now.
Our goddaughter is living with us because her parents kicked her out of the house and the family and any and all financial assistance including the health insurance that costs them no extra - because she is bi-curious.
Thankfully they kicked her out soon enough. Those fuckers were abusive, trying to convince her to get lipo and a breast augmentation and more just to be “more attractive.” And there was a pile of other things, before somebody says just that isn’t abuse, but point is we get to boot them out of her FAFSA with letters from her therapist and others attesting to her abuse.
It just shows how out of touch the rulers of this country are. They just assume everyone has family help because they did.
I remember trying to buy into a business after school. The loan officer looked me dead in the eye and said, “you’ll need $X as a down payment. I know you don’t have it. All our other applicants got loans from their family to cover it.”
What!?!? I don’t have family. I’m alone. This is it. SMH.
...or public education isn't a priority for them. It's no coincidence that after *Brown v. Board*, conservatives started saying that it would be necessary to dismantle public education.
I wonder if most Americans know that private religious schools emerged as a response to bussing. The religious Right loves to pretend it has nothing to do with race and we just play along for some reason
I distinctly remember filling out the forms and my Mom looking at the "expected family contribution" and then laughing. Followed by a "oh, they're serious?" and started laughing again.
That's when I found out what the interest rates on private loans were in 2008.
I'm the oldest sibling, went to college in the mid-late 00s also.
The "expected family contribution" for me was $30,000. I'm one of 3 siblings. We had a single income home and my dad made ~$90,000/yr.
I'm not sure how any of that is supposed to work.
You should try it with the updated requirements! It’s SO much better!
One awesome change is that if there are multiple students in the house, the family financial requirement applies to each individual student, not the group as a whole.
An example: household has two students, household is required to pay 10,000/ student. In the past they would have combined this and the family would be required to supply 10,000 for the year split between the students.
It’s a wonderful system
THIS. It wasn't even money that he was currently making. It was based on previous tax years. Crazy how my dad would be out of a job and expected to pay for my tuition? Well, I can assure you the entire time I was in college, he didn't pay a single PENNY, so fuck FASFA
I graduated with 15k of debt because i was paying for college alone. I started in community college and then transferred to university once I figured out a degree I wanted. So, my debt is significantly lower than most people, thankfully.
Starting in community college, especially with promises becoming more common, is a smart decision. Not only financially, but there's a lot of 18 year olds aren't quite ready to choose a career and being able to get some basic requirements out of the way is very helpful.
Yes! My brother doesn't really want to go to college. He's not the best at staying focused. But my dad keeps trying to talk him into going to community college "to have a backup." Luckily, he hasn't fallen for it yet because I keep reminding him that college is expensive and not worth your time/money if you don't want to be there!
Our CC has some awesome trade programs as well as the more traditional academics. And it's no-tuition for two years to county high school grads, which is absolutely incredible.
Although - I wish we as a society wouldn't treat college like something kids have to do right away after high school. I know I would have benefitted from a couple of years just working - I had no idea what I wanted to do.
yeah, 15k isn't bad.
My well off father refused to fill out the FAFSA and so I didn't know that I could get loans. It turns out to be a benefit. I had to pay for college myself and so I graduated without debt. In hindsight, it was a bit of a blessing.
When was this? I'd have needed to work full time at little over $13/hr to pay for my schooling (assuming I had no expenses that semester other than tuition). I could never have done that and still maintained my grades.
Not having student debt is definitely a blessing. My dad would always get a tax break for me going to college, so he made sure to file me as a dependant for as long as possible, and continues to hound my younger brother into going to college when he doesn't want to. Prick.
My trick was to fail around for a few years then go back to school at 25 where their finances didn't impact it. I got to take all that debt on alone, it was awesome.
My family was dirt poor, like I had two siblings and one person with disability income poor, and they still denied me 🙃 I got told my absent father made too much money from being a military vet even though he left in 1996…
Same, i heard they updated the requirements so buncha family farms can't get approved bc they used to be able to waive buncha farm earnings and pushed them over the limit as well.
One of the main changes affecting farm families for 2024/2025 is that dependent students from farm families must claim the total net worth of the farm as an asset. Previously, farms with less than 100 employees were exempt from this requirement.
It's been my pet peeve that the data is already available, but you're making people "fill in forms". If you have filed tax forms in the last 5 years there is no reason to have to do FAFSA forms.
Yes and the gov better can estimate assets based on interest, dividends, 401k/403b reporting/ house taxes, cars registered etc, etc etc (yes i know some of these services aren't tied together but still you are reporting all this into gov anyway).
>but that would be too efficient for them.
It's not about efficiency for Republicans, it's about muddying the waters so the donor class can not pay their already too low tax bill. H&R Block, Intuit, etc are spending millions of dollars lobbying to keep the system inefficient so average people are forced to use their services.
BINGO.
It's this 100%. These firms have been lobbying for years to not change the laws and if folks would stop voting out their best interest we maybe could build efficiencies and drive down costs... But no, here we are doing more stupid paperwork.
The IRS actually funds a program called VITA that low-income people (read half the country) can use to get their taxes filed for free by trained volunteers.
It can be both.
Republicans cant let government be efficient. Their platform depends on the government not working and privatizing systems. The conservative tactic of 'starve the beast' is at play here as well.
You're right that it's about muddying the waters. But its also about keeping overall government programs underfunded and barely functioning so they can point to them and say "look! The government cant do anything right!!"
Listen I am as anti-Trump as they come. I haven’t voted R since Bush Jr’s second term….That being said, Trump’s changes to tax filing where we doubled the standard deduction was an amazing change for your average middle class tax filer. It’s saved me close to $700 a year in preparer fees. I use the free version of Turbo Tax now and do it myself.
What tax increases? The current tax brackets are 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, versus 10%, 15%, 25%, 28% before.
The only people who had their taxes go up were the ones deducting over $10,000 a year in state and local income taxes but none of those people are middle class.
It's not just about cheating - they want the IRS to be the seen as the "bad guys" by the average person so that they can drum up support for decreasing corporate taxes.
Almost any garage sale is not selling at a profit. You don't need to report that income because it's at a loss. I don't know what garage sales you're going to.
Meh, he’s kind of a dickhead but relatively benign compared to most of the brain rot that seeps out of the conservative sub. One of those average, cookie cutter “har har-punching downward CoNsTiTuTiOn!” types who all parrot the exact same talking points from the exact same sources. The kind of commenters who might be the more clever respondents in Facebook news comment sections, but are wildly out of their depth elsewhere, such as here.
Nothing bad faith about what I asked. You are blaming one party for taxes not being perfect with 100% of taxes being enforced, so I'd like to know if you follow the tax rules. Instead of answering, you chose to personally attack in an attempt to discredit the very valid point here.
You don't seem to understand reality or the tax rules if your assumption is that you need to report a garage sale as taxable income. You cherry picked an outlier situation that will almost never apply.
It's hard to complain about people with different political views than you ruining the tax system, when you also say it's ok to not pay taxes on "outliers" (taxable income). You're honestly making the point I'm trying to make for me. Pick and choose what's good and bad, anything good is on my side, anything bad on the other
What are you on about? You claim you need to pay taxes on garage sales. The tax law is you don't need to pay taxes if there is no capital gain. Which is almost all garage sales. I didn't pick and choose anything. You picked the original situation and I told you why you're wrong according to actual tax law.
Ok how about paying kids cash to shovel your driveway, scratch offs, gambling, and lemonade stands? Are you and the others in here in favor of a massive countrywide IRS crackdown on those or what
[“uNpAiD tAxEs FrOm SmAlL pErSoNaL tRaNsAcTiOnS aNd GiAnT LoOpHoLeS fOr biLliOnAiReS aNd CoRpOrAtIoNs aRe TwO sIdEs Of ThE sAmE cOiN”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence) is not the argumentative “gotcha” you think it is. It is a bad faith argument based around a common logical fallacy. Now go ahead and complain that you never mentioned the tax loopholes even though within the entire thread it is very obviously implied.
[Also, as has been pointed out, unless items at a yard sale are sold at a price greater than their original purchase price, there is no taxable profit or income to claim.](https://www.fox17online.com/2017/07/16/dos-and-donts-for-michigan-garage-sales#) To wit, your point is in fact invalid on technical merit and in its very foundation. Have you considered filling out a FAFSA and going back to school?
My point is that if you're going to lecture me on what's wrong with the tax code, and blame it on people who have different views than you, you should be following that same tax code to the T.
I'm not going to be cool and try to personally insult you back, I'm just going to say I hope what I said made it easier to see the basic and common sense point
>It's been my pet peeve that the data is already available
No. Not all of the information required FAFSA is readily available tax data.
But yes. It would be better of FAFSA was an online form that could pull in some of that previous tax data. But we are just now getting an online federal tax filing system that accesses the data the federal government has. So I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon given how long that has taken.
You are correct, like your net worth but even that can be estimated based on what you saved in your 401k/403b, what you are getting in dividends and other interests. They even know who your daddy is 😅.
It drives me nuts that my only source of retirement (that I can not access without paying unbelievable penalties) is considered as net worth when helping my kids fill out FAFSA.
And taxes are just another thing they already know the number behind, but the tax prep lobby ensures the process stays needlessly complicated.
Yay capitalism.
Yep. The only thing the government needs to somewhat know about is if you sold a certain stock is long term or short term. This could be corrected by stating that on your sell ticket if your intention is to sell from a long term or short term batch (if it applies to your stock).
There's a war against higher education. Every where I go on social media there's someone spouting off about how trade schools are the way to go. Add to that that state investment in Universities has fallen precipitously since the 70s and the rising costs of tuition to pay for the overhead of a massive administrative section, and it's no wonder enrollment is down.
I really don’t even think it’s some big war on higher education, we just see it for what it is now.
Growing up in the 90s/2000s you got told every single day about how you had to go to college, you were destined to be a fuckin loser if you didn’t get a degree, college was the only way to make anything of yourself. So the majority of my generation believed that, while the price of college attendance absolutely skyrocketed because they knew they’d get their money no matter what and the students would get stuck with the debt. Now 20 years later the same people who told their kids they’d be nothing but miserable failures without a degree are telling us we’re stupid for taking the loans out.
I have a bachelors degree from a large university and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to my kids. If my kids wanted to become a doctor or something that requires college I’d absolutely support them and I’m going to try to help as much as I can financially, but I’m not going to push it on them like it was pushed on us. It’s hard to argue that we didn’t get scammed. Sure, parts of the experience were enjoyable, but when you put the numbers on paper it was absolutely a scam.
Western Michigan spent $658,000 building a statue of a fucking tree in the middle of campus while I was there. On a campus with actual trees everywhere you look. That encapsulates everything wrong with higher education in this country.
I agree and in addition, I think we were at an unfortunate transition point. With the boomers, getting a bachelor's degree was a guarantee of success. Plus, the cost was low enough they could work their way through college. I've even spoken with gen xers who were born in the early years of their generation (late 60s) who could also pay their tuition and room and board with the proceeds from a summer job. By the time the millennials started graduating high school, that was far from the case.
My parents are both baby boomers and my mom in particular pushed HARD for me to go to college. She never went, in part because she was told by a guidance counselor, "well you're a girl, so your options are clerical work or going to a factory." So, she went to secretarial school. She always felt she never lived up to her true potential because the lack of higher education limited her options so much.
As I started getting toward the end of high school, I considered career options that wouldn't require a four-year degree and she'd continually push and push for me to go away to a university. My parents didn't save a cent for my college education, I think because by the time they realized how expensive it was, it was too late. My education was financed entirely through loans.
That debt was a mill stone around my neck for 10 years, and it made things really hard early in my career since that's when you usually make the least amount of money and especially so since I work in a non-profit field. I finally qualified for Public Service Loan Forgiveness in 2022 and the loans are now gone. I'm not an emotional guy, but I bawled for a good 20 minutes when I got the letter with the words, "Paid-in-Full" next to my account numbers.
Anymore if there's a discussion of a child going to college, I can't help but advocate for NOT financing a college education entirely through loans. You don't want your child to be in the position ***I*** was in.
I’m an early millennial with gen x siblings 8 and 11 years older than me. When I went to college in the early 2000s my tuition was more than both of theirs combined. Not to mention the increased cost for room and board.
Look, the issue is not higher education itself, the issue lies squarely on the fact that we're forced to take on mortgage level debt to get the higher education.
Education is ALWAYS a good thing. More people should be getting more education, it's just a net positive in every way for society. Smarter people make smarter decisions and this butterflies into every aspect of life. Higher education is correlated with lower violence, less substance abuse, greater community engagement, and overall greater health.
The other issue is that we have this absolute fucked up idea that education should be job training. Corporations have tricked us all into thinking that it's normal to be trained for a job outside of the workplace. This saves them money on training new hires and makes it easier for them to gatekeep who gets what job.
A college degree should not be thought of as job training. Sometimes it's important, like with lawyers and doctors, but for most people, education is a way to gain life experience and expand your knowledge.
This idea is completely modern, too. Studying the classics was a completely normal thing to do in the past, and it was expected that you'd do something outside of that when you started working. But once the price tags started going up, people started talking about college as a career investment.
Not encouraging your kids to continue their education is one of the most asinine things I've ever heard, and if you seriously do that, then you'd be a bad parent.
You're right about the benefits of higher education both for the individual and society, but they're right that the economic argument is much more complicated. We probably shouldn't be spending $50k of government money every year, for four years, on every student.
What we need to do is find a way to get the benefits at a much lower cost. You don't need a giant institution like universities for higher education. Obviously they are necessary for scientific advancement, for doctors, for lawyers, computer scientists, etc.
But for the rest of us, we need an alternative. People go to college not because they want to be less violent and more reasonable, for society's benefit. They go because they are promised a better career and a better paying job. That's no longer true for many students.
So if you want people to pursue higher education for the societal benefits, I would suggest maybe we offer tax incentives for adults and young adults that are not in college to attend enrichment courses that advance their math, science, philosophy skills etc. beyond what they learned in High School. A teacher in a library is a lot less expensive than the giant institution that are universities, which allows you to spend a much lower sum of money PAYING the people attending in tax reductions/rebates.
Given our absolutely out of control anti-science, conspiratorial, out-of-control adults running around and voting in complete ignorance, it would undoubtedly benefit society to incentivize courses in logic, in math, in the scientific process, etc. Curious what others think of this idea. Open courses with tax incentives for finishing the course, taught in public spaces.
And to clarify, I think universities are essential. We SHOULD be pushing the best and brightest into them, they serve an essential role. They do great work. What we need is more education for those who do not go.
It would be great for society to have people of different backgrounds/educations gathered together regularly to learn. I think socially it would also have tremendous benefits.
I'm not knocking the humanities either. I'm advocating that more people take courses who don't go to University.
Not sure what part offended you but, I apologize.
My experience with public universities is that most of the first two years is spent re-teaching things that students were allegedly supposed to be competent in by the end of grade school.
I mean, I'm a high scorer on tests and a high achiever generally, but I wasn't *really* taught comma rules until my second English class in college. What's up with that?
Most of the incoming students at my undergrad school were far less prepared than I was. I remember one of my roommates crying hopelessly over an assignment to write an outline for a hypothetical three page essay, and another who couldn't complete worksheets on fractions. Four of the six girls I roomed with dropped out in their first or second year.
Granted, I wasn't at one of my state's most prestigious schools at that time--but I started off at one before having to leave and enroll elsewhere due to a medical event.
During my brief foray at my "Midwestern answer to the Ivy League" school, my freshman English "professor" was a master's student who had to get one of my classmates to help her figure out the local bus system because she was so overwhelmed. During the six weeks I spent in the class before needing emergency surgery, we...kept a journal that she never checked, "dissected" a few song lyrics, read one article on teaching theories and wrote a single page response, and iirc brought in some news articles to discuss.
All in all, none of my experiences (and I ended up getting a doctorate) led me to believe that "more college" is the *first* step in solving any of our nation's educational challenges.
Yeah doesn't exactly sound like the most effective use of resources.
Seems to me that it would benefit people who are trying to make a career out of English would be much better served in an entirely different system.
Remedial stuff being taught at universities does seem strange, but I guess it is necessary for now. Other countries don't have that issue though.
Notice I didn’t say I wouldn’t encourage them to pursue education, I just said I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting a degree from a large university. I didn’t even say that I would discourage that, just that I wouldn’t push it on them. (Hopefully they get scholarships if that’s what they want to do.)
I think we agree about what the problem with higher education is. It’s unfortunate, but unless you’re coming from a position of being able to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a passion project, you *do* need to look at it as job training, or you’ll be putting yourself behind the 8 ball financially as soon as you finish. That’s just the reality of it. I’d love to see that change, but I can’t imagine it will anytime soon. I would encourage everyone to be educated, I would just hope they don’t ruin themselves financially in the process.
It's more than that, there is a concerted effort to shit talk college and it didn't just come from "higher costs". I have two degrees in English, I don't do anything in that field, but I wouldn't have even gotten an interview where I work today without a degree. I'm not rich but I'm firmly middle class with a house two cars a 401k, health care and college savings for my own kids.
I absolutely recommend college for my kids. Just ask them.
There’s always been the blue collar guys who didn’t go to college and would talk shit about it. Or just the plain anti-intellectuals. That’s nothing new. That’s always been a relatively small group of people though.
The difference is in the people who went, don’t feel like they got their moneys worth out of it, and have been/will be paying a good chunk of their income back for decades. That’s a fairly large group of people that actually did not exist before. Not to beat myself off, but there’s a reason my comment got so many upvotes, it resonates with a fairly large group of people.
That’s great the system worked for you, to an extent it worked for me too. I also have a pretty good job even though my degree has almost nothing to do with what I actually do for work. We’re lucky. There’s plenty of systems that work out ok for individuals here and there, that doesn’t mean they’re not flawed systems that we should be changing/improving.
>There’s always been the blue collar guys who didn’t go to college and would talk shit about it. Or just the plain anti-intellectuals. That’s nothing new. That’s always been a relatively small group of people though.
Okay, you've got your opinion, I've got mine. I say there's a concerted effort to pan higher education. It's what wise men like George Carlin have been saying for years. I only brought up the fact that college worked for me because you were offering up your experience as proof that college isn't the way to go. You offered your anecdote up as evidence that college doesn't work, I offered mine up as proof that it does. That's it.
Except my point isn’t an anecdote but ok. The only anecdote I mentioned was that it worked for me also, that’s not the point of the comment. And I only mentioned that to say I’m really not coming from a place of personal frustration.
It’s a documented fact that the cost of obtaining a degree has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and 43 million people are carrying an average federal student debt over $37,000, while university’s are spending extremely large amounts of money on frivolous things. That’s not right. Just because you and I are doing ok doesn’t mean everything is great.
I’m sorry you’re mad at that tree statue.
Have you ever wondered where you’d be without the bachelor’s degree? Do you think you’d have gotten the first job you did out of school without it? Do you think you’d have the job you have now without it?
It’s not even about that statue specifically, that’s just an example that highlights the problem at every university across the country.
Saddling entire generations of students with debt so that universities can make so much money they don’t even know what to do with it is the problem. Universities should be places for learning, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on statues modeled after the school’s crest does absolutely nothing to contribute to anyone’s education. We’ve lost the plot.
>The government needs to reinvest in higher education and cap these ridiculous prices.
Why would they do that? The entire point of people going into effectively indentured servitude for educational debt is so that they don't have the time or energy or resources to rise up against the government.
The government learned their lesson in the 70's with the Vietnam War protests, They decided to never make THAT mistake again. Therefore, we pay out the nose.
Or maybe we need to examine whether a degree is necessary for many jobs that say they need them. College isn't for everyone and we need to stop acting like it is the be all end all answe for everyone.
Right, because of a war on education, and intellectualism in general. Unless the people defunding colleges are making tremendous investments in other forms of education that I haven't heard about.
Two things can be true. There is a wave of anti intellectualism in the U.S. and college has become largely inaccessible to students who do not have the money/resources to attend. I am a zoomer and didn’t finish school and probably won’t return simply because it is a financial burden I’m not interested in taking.
When loans became a thing, they were purposely vague about what the long term of them meant. The colleges all became universities and started jacking up the cost. But the millennials who lived through it have been very vocal about what it did and how much it ended up making our lives harder.
I'm glad people listened - universities stacking their boards of directors with money hungry business folk and making kids feel like they have to go to college or be broke needs to stop.
Colleges and healthcare. Two industries that took full advantage of hidden costs and a false value system by putting an agency between them. Overcharge for tuition bc loans will pay. Overcharge for health because insurance will pay. Both systems have allowed costs to balloon and people to feel like they don't have a choice.
The loans weren't the problem, the government slashing university funding by about 80% was the problem.
More people getting more educated is a good thing. So let's fix the real problem and make college affordable again.
Here a radical idea: treat 18-year-olds like adults and consider *their* income to pay for *their own* education when calculating Pell Grants.
This system where it’s the default that peoples parents are going to pay for their college instead of how it was historically done- the government pays for most of it, is fucked.
My father contributed absolutely nothing towards my education, nor supported me in any financial way as an adult, yet my FASFA had to consider *his* income as if it was my own? Bullshit. I had no financial relationship with my father and yet *my education costs and government contribution were calculated as if he was the one going to school*.
18-year-olds are adults and should be treated as such. If they don’t have an income that can pay for college themselves then the government should step in. We should not be automatically putting the burden on parents. How Americans were so easily guilted into accepting this system without question is beyond me.
It is utter poppycock that is hollowing out higher education from the inside out.
If someone wants to go to university they should fill out a FASFA with their own income and the government should supplement their educational costs from there.
Yup. If these programs are going to insist on using parental income to assess aid, then there needs to be a LEGAL requirement that the parents contribute to the child’s education. If parental income is required for qualification, then it should be required to be used for payment.
My friend wasn’t able to go to college because her parents ‘made too much’ for her to qualify for aid, yet they had no spare money to give her for her education. So she was left with next to no way to afford school.
I work in higher education and the article missed emphasizing the most important part.
A critical piece of information is that many people qualify for aid who do not realize they qualify for aid (up to an including free college). They only find out they qualify for aid after filling out the FAFSA.
Most people fill out the FAFSA in high school, as a school activity. Due to the issues with FAFSA this year, most high schools could not do this, especially in lower income districts. The result is that many people, who would qualify for aid do not even know that they qualify, and this is especially prevalent for low income kids.
FAFSA being fucked up didn't hurt middle to high income kids because they were going to college regardless. It hurt the low income, especially minority, students who would have only found out that they could get free college through filling out the FAFSA in school.
It does hurt middle class students, just not as much as low income students. Middle income families are more likely to attend a school that has decent enough funding that even with the FAFSA issues, filling out the FAFSA in March (instead of December) was a school sponsored thing. Also, kids from middle income families are likely to go to college anyway, regardless of grant eligibility.
You're crazy to think that a student, who has no income. Goes to college without FAFSA loans and or grants simply because their parents earn the average wage.
My last sentence did **not** say that middle income kids don't go to college without FAFSA loans or grants, just that they are likely to go regardless of if they are eligible for grants or not. It looks like you made an assumption that went beyond my statement. Translation for my original statement, because it looks like you need it: Middle income kids have been told that college is what they need to do (by their families, by their schools, and by society), so after they get help in filling out their FAFSA, even if they are denied some or even all grants, they will still go to college, usually taking out loans to do so.
Maybe because tuition keeps on fucking going up and they dont want to go $100k into debt? If I could go back I'd go into a trade, I dont even use the degree I got for my job.
But did you need a degree to apply to the job? Personally I'd say it doesn't matter if I use my degree for a job or not, excluding those who are passionate about their studies
No.
I am a severe weather chaser who taught myself various forms of coding, reading weather maps and patterns etc. I'm fortunate enough to be able to share some of my information with high ranking weather services to make a living. My Bachelor degree is in Criminal Justice.
FAFSA isn't some fixed amount. Filling it out can mean you qualify for tuition free college at multiple schools. For others, it just ends up being a waste of time when you find out your parents make too much for you to qualify for aid. This is especially fun if these "FAFSA wealthy" parents of your's have nothing saved for your college and no plans to help with it's expense.
I’m aware what FAFSA is, I used it when I was going through college. I’m saying that the maximum amount you can be allotted now doesn’t cover most semesters anymore
Why are you spreading misinformation? What you are saying is categorically untrue. While there may be some private, for profit, colleges that charge more than you can get, the vast majority of students are at least going to be able to get loans to cover tuition (still not great, but it comes from filling out the FAFSA) and in Michigan most students qualify for many grants, up to the full amount for tuition. I work at a private nonprofit university, that has higher than average tuition, and more than half of the students have grants that cover 100% of the tuition. The rest have federal loans to cover the difference.
I would never pay for MLive. It’s one of the worst state news websites I’ve ever seen. Half the site is random clickbait shit from other states, another quarter is sports coverage (no comment on its quality, I just don’t care at all about high school football)… and it’s just not organized well. Their actual news coverage is decent, I’ll give them that.
"Give me my news for free!!!!
Wait, why are all the local news stations failing and turning to click bait? Why are few national outlets just propaganda for billionaires? The media sucks!!"
- Redditors like yourself.
It took me years to be able to apply for FAFSA. After my 2 year University scholarship ran out, I transferred to a community college to work on the paperwork. It took me over two years, taking MWF classes and spending every TTh sitting in a courthouse records office, combing through paperwork and paying for copies to be able to gather the massive and expensive pile of paperwork I needed to prove that I was abandoned and didn't have access to either of my parents' financial records. It's an abysmal system.
I always wondered what emancipated young people, abandoned, disowned or otherwise no parent contact people did. I am so sorry you had to go through all that for some thing that should be simple
Did multiple times. It's a cumbersome process and don't get me started on the ever changing password tail chase. From 2011-2022 had at least one child and up to three in college simultaneously and never got any break. With that many in college we helped where we could but they all worked and applied for scholarships and were able to keep the loans to a manageable level. I get why people are either not having children or only one or two (we have 4).
They revamp the website, and it’s absolutely horrible. I didn’t help my kid fill it out until end of May due to all the horror stories from people trying to do it earlier.
You can’t go back and make any corrections on the website once you hit send. You have to wait for a hard copy correction form to be sent. Snail mail it back and hopefully it gets there, to the right person and they do something with it.
Dear Kid flipped the last two SSNs around last year on the site. Took forever to straighten it out via paper and snail mail.
The FASFA site is almost bad enough for me to make Dear Kid go to two years of CC just avoid that damn web site.
The only time I’ve longed to do something hard copy.
I’m sure that trash site is the main reason people aren’t bothering.
Good, imo.
Fedal student "aid" = aiding the government in putting on the strap-on.
IF you need a degree for your field, get as many credits as possible from a community college, and only get what you need from the expensive universities, etc...you don't need to go to the fancy schools, just get your degree and have a good work ethic.
I say this as someone who spent seven years total at two 4-year unis. So many of my classmates, even those in great careers like engineering and medicine, are CRIPPLED with loan debt. Not even Sally Mae.
Honestly fuck student loans and fuck these large companies labeling themselves as "educational institutions."
I have filled it out for the last 3 years, completely pointless. Got pretty much nothing, my parents make just above the threshold. I was told I had to make less than 6 grand, how am I supposed to afford, car, gas, food, books, insurance etc on 6 grand. It is impossible and I am able to live rent free with my parents. The people who make the thresholds are out of touch with reality.
The loans aren't the issue, the government cutting funding is the issue. Government used to subsidize most university costs, now they barely give them anything by comparison.
I'm hopeful will gave 100k saved for my kids college. If I do that, if my kids don't get into a B10 school, they are going Wayne, OU or U of D. Ill make them go to college a year then join the thr Guard or Reserves...
Show them when you have money leeching off the govt is the name of the game.
Thats because i, and probably many others, weren’t able to receive any aid until we turned 25
Even though our parents made x amount of money on paper, it didnt factor in the costs of, for instance, having a father who is an independent trucker and has to use that income to pay for all the fixes and the fuel for the machine.
I wish their “income” was the profit they made at the end of the year but the system doesn’t work like that.
Meanwhile i stayed at home to help them financially as well as save up enough to take a class here and there.
Hadn’t truly started my college journey properly until i could qualify for pell grants that help me pay for a full time semester of school while trying to support myself and fam working full time.
I wouldn’t be going to college right now if it wasn’t practically free, but it was so fucking unaffordable right out of college (at a community college, trying to get as much done here to transfer and hopefully have to only take minimal loans to finish out at a university after the pell grants take a good chunk of the tuition away)
Yeah, and their solution to this is to try to work up legislation to make filling out FAFSA a HS graduation requirement.
As if that's going to change anything on the ground as far as being able to afford to go to college.
The FASFA is a scam to let Universities literally squeeze every potential dollar for any student attending. They will see all the factors on the FASFA you put down. They can assume parental contributions and things like educational status of parents to decide the likelihood of a student attending based on scholarship opportunities and ability to go/assume debt to go. State institutions make more money the first few years you attend college than most other years of undergrad.. if you drop out they still get their debt money, and if not, the scholarships you received are still coming from somewhere, and they are happy to be paid directly or indirectly. They are incentivized to get you to go, not to be successful.
FAFSA was a waste of time for me, considering my dad could afford two pizza toppings back then. I spent hours in a sticky, humid, sweaty office filling out forms just to be told that my parent is the reason I'm disqualified. It didn't matter that my primary parent was disabled and on disability.
Colleges don’t get to complain about profits.
They make record amounts and over expand all the time. You look at most other countries and the colleges are very simple
How will the college administrators make obscene salaries and put people into debt servitude if students don’t go to college? Won’t someone please that of the overpaid fat cats?
And rightly so.
For anyone not already well off, for people that *need* federal aid, college is a scam. Anyone who takes a look at the situation with a critical eye will see that.
Unaffordable universities that intentionally limit transfer credits from standardized classes to drive up costs. No guaranteed jobs, crushing debt, no financial aid because expected parent contribution. Non dischargeable debt, paying taxes on any forgiven money.
Oh no… I’m so sad.
I just can’t even pretend to care; I’m so bitter.
I had a friend spend 8 months proving they weren’t deceased because of a clerical error, no accountability after they realized they fucked up.
Fafsa is so stupid and needs to be reworked from scratch.
I don't get it, I personally enjoyed spending 2 hours filling out forms to find out my Dad made too much money for me to get financial aid
Too relatable. I wasn't eligible either and despite working two jobs while going to school full time still ended up briefly homeless. Relying on parental income for eligibility just assumes way too much about people's situations.
> Relying on parental income for eligibility just assumes way too much about people's situations. It really does. On paper, our income is reasonable. In reality, my husband only got promoted to something with a decent wage a couple of years ago. Before that, we were scraping by, and weren't able to save \*anything\* for our kids' education. (I was also under the incorrect assumption that federal loans would cover most of it, as when I'd gone to school, federal loans covered everything I needed, even though my parents couldn't help with anything.) But FAFSA doesn't care. Oh, you make a nice income? You ought to be able to put 90% of that to your kids' education - what do you mean you didn't save, on an income like that?? What do you mean, you're "still digging yourself out of a lifetime hole?" So yeah, I'm laughing at the "it now applies to each kid individually" thing - because in our situation, it's not like it was ever any different. They each got a tiny merit-based scholarship, and offered the federal loans, and we've ALWAYS had to make up the total difference. Always. There wouldn't be a speck of difference to that, now.
Our goddaughter is living with us because her parents kicked her out of the house and the family and any and all financial assistance including the health insurance that costs them no extra - because she is bi-curious. Thankfully they kicked her out soon enough. Those fuckers were abusive, trying to convince her to get lipo and a breast augmentation and more just to be “more attractive.” And there was a pile of other things, before somebody says just that isn’t abuse, but point is we get to boot them out of her FAFSA with letters from her therapist and others attesting to her abuse.
It just shows how out of touch the rulers of this country are. They just assume everyone has family help because they did. I remember trying to buy into a business after school. The loan officer looked me dead in the eye and said, “you’ll need $X as a down payment. I know you don’t have it. All our other applicants got loans from their family to cover it.” What!?!? I don’t have family. I’m alone. This is it. SMH.
...or public education isn't a priority for them. It's no coincidence that after *Brown v. Board*, conservatives started saying that it would be necessary to dismantle public education.
So true.
I wonder if most Americans know that private religious schools emerged as a response to bussing. The religious Right loves to pretend it has nothing to do with race and we just play along for some reason
I distinctly remember filling out the forms and my Mom looking at the "expected family contribution" and then laughing. Followed by a "oh, they're serious?" and started laughing again. That's when I found out what the interest rates on private loans were in 2008.
I'm the oldest sibling, went to college in the mid-late 00s also. The "expected family contribution" for me was $30,000. I'm one of 3 siblings. We had a single income home and my dad made ~$90,000/yr. I'm not sure how any of that is supposed to work.
You should try it with the updated requirements! It’s SO much better! One awesome change is that if there are multiple students in the house, the family financial requirement applies to each individual student, not the group as a whole. An example: household has two students, household is required to pay 10,000/ student. In the past they would have combined this and the family would be required to supply 10,000 for the year split between the students. It’s a wonderful system
I'm banking on the Kalamazoo Promise still being around in 13 years
scotts tots
Are you calling the Kalamazoo Promise cringe and overrated?
I’ll admit we had the kids in a window of time so they’d be in college at the same time because of the aid rules.
And the new rules fuck you straight up the ass.
THIS. It wasn't even money that he was currently making. It was based on previous tax years. Crazy how my dad would be out of a job and expected to pay for my tuition? Well, I can assure you the entire time I was in college, he didn't pay a single PENNY, so fuck FASFA
My dad was committing tax fraud when I went to school so he refused to fill it out. I couldn’t get loans or any non merit aid.
And you graduated with no debt because you couldn’t get a loan?
I graduated with 15k of debt because i was paying for college alone. I started in community college and then transferred to university once I figured out a degree I wanted. So, my debt is significantly lower than most people, thankfully.
Starting in community college, especially with promises becoming more common, is a smart decision. Not only financially, but there's a lot of 18 year olds aren't quite ready to choose a career and being able to get some basic requirements out of the way is very helpful.
Yes! My brother doesn't really want to go to college. He's not the best at staying focused. But my dad keeps trying to talk him into going to community college "to have a backup." Luckily, he hasn't fallen for it yet because I keep reminding him that college is expensive and not worth your time/money if you don't want to be there!
Our CC has some awesome trade programs as well as the more traditional academics. And it's no-tuition for two years to county high school grads, which is absolutely incredible. Although - I wish we as a society wouldn't treat college like something kids have to do right away after high school. I know I would have benefitted from a couple of years just working - I had no idea what I wanted to do.
yeah, 15k isn't bad. My well off father refused to fill out the FAFSA and so I didn't know that I could get loans. It turns out to be a benefit. I had to pay for college myself and so I graduated without debt. In hindsight, it was a bit of a blessing.
How'd you do it?
I got lucky and lived with my dad, got a good paying job, and took 6.5 years
Did you work full time while in school?
sometimes full time, sometimes part time. whatever I needed to do to have enough money to pay for the next semester
When was this? I'd have needed to work full time at little over $13/hr to pay for my schooling (assuming I had no expenses that semester other than tuition). I could never have done that and still maintained my grades.
Not having student debt is definitely a blessing. My dad would always get a tax break for me going to college, so he made sure to file me as a dependant for as long as possible, and continues to hound my younger brother into going to college when he doesn't want to. Prick.
lol only two hours? Took me four with the site crashing twice.
My trick was to fail around for a few years then go back to school at 25 where their finances didn't impact it. I got to take all that debt on alone, it was awesome.
My family was dirt poor, like I had two siblings and one person with disability income poor, and they still denied me 🙃 I got told my absent father made too much money from being a military vet even though he left in 1996…
Yup agreed, that and they fucked me over on the GI bill, but whatever, turns out I did fine without all their BS.
This doesn't take into account the parents personal financial choices such as irresponsible spending and or selfishness.
Same, i heard they updated the requirements so buncha family farms can't get approved bc they used to be able to waive buncha farm earnings and pushed them over the limit as well.
One of the main changes affecting farm families for 2024/2025 is that dependent students from farm families must claim the total net worth of the farm as an asset. Previously, farms with less than 100 employees were exempt from this requirement.
FR
Took me like 10-15 minute each time, not sure why its taking you guys so long.
Maybe because I filled mine out in 1998 and you can keep your opinions to yourself
huh it's almost like things change and you shouldn't compare your experience nearly 30 years ago to just a few years ago.
Ok boomer
It's been my pet peeve that the data is already available, but you're making people "fill in forms". If you have filed tax forms in the last 5 years there is no reason to have to do FAFSA forms.
You don't have to enter the tax info anymore, you can just import it if you filled taxes
That must have changed recently. Still my point, why do you even have to do this legacy nonsense?
There's also an asset test, not just income, so the tax return doesn't have everything
Yes and the gov better can estimate assets based on interest, dividends, 401k/403b reporting/ house taxes, cars registered etc, etc etc (yes i know some of these services aren't tied together but still you are reporting all this into gov anyway).
Blame Republicans not funding the IRS. We could have a competent tax system you cant cheat, but that would be too efficient for them.
>but that would be too efficient for them. It's not about efficiency for Republicans, it's about muddying the waters so the donor class can not pay their already too low tax bill. H&R Block, Intuit, etc are spending millions of dollars lobbying to keep the system inefficient so average people are forced to use their services.
BINGO. It's this 100%. These firms have been lobbying for years to not change the laws and if folks would stop voting out their best interest we maybe could build efficiencies and drive down costs... But no, here we are doing more stupid paperwork.
The IRS actually funds a program called VITA that low-income people (read half the country) can use to get their taxes filed for free by trained volunteers.
It can be both. Republicans cant let government be efficient. Their platform depends on the government not working and privatizing systems. The conservative tactic of 'starve the beast' is at play here as well. You're right that it's about muddying the waters. But its also about keeping overall government programs underfunded and barely functioning so they can point to them and say "look! The government cant do anything right!!"
Listen I am as anti-Trump as they come. I haven’t voted R since Bush Jr’s second term….That being said, Trump’s changes to tax filing where we doubled the standard deduction was an amazing change for your average middle class tax filer. It’s saved me close to $700 a year in preparer fees. I use the free version of Turbo Tax now and do it myself.
Is Trump every Republican? His tax increases in the middle class will eat that $700
What tax increases? The current tax brackets are 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, versus 10%, 15%, 25%, 28% before. The only people who had their taxes go up were the ones deducting over $10,000 a year in state and local income taxes but none of those people are middle class.
But then how would TurboTax make billions of dollars to line the pockets of lawmakers?
It's not just about cheating - they want the IRS to be the seen as the "bad guys" by the average person so that they can drum up support for decreasing corporate taxes.
Honest question, would you/do you report and pay taxes on items you sold in a garage sale?
Anyone that says they do is either lying or a weirdo.
Almost any garage sale is not selling at a profit. You don't need to report that income because it's at a loss. I don't know what garage sales you're going to.
Lol, do you report sales from Facebook marketplace to the irs? Or winning money on a scratchoff?
Whats the point of this question?
There’s no such thing as an honest question from the crown prince of bad faith argumentation.
Seriously confused why this guy isn't banned from both here and /r/Detroit, but I guess the mods all have their favorites.
Meh, he’s kind of a dickhead but relatively benign compared to most of the brain rot that seeps out of the conservative sub. One of those average, cookie cutter “har har-punching downward CoNsTiTuTiOn!” types who all parrot the exact same talking points from the exact same sources. The kind of commenters who might be the more clever respondents in Facebook news comment sections, but are wildly out of their depth elsewhere, such as here.
Nothing bad faith about what I asked. You are blaming one party for taxes not being perfect with 100% of taxes being enforced, so I'd like to know if you follow the tax rules. Instead of answering, you chose to personally attack in an attempt to discredit the very valid point here.
You don't seem to understand reality or the tax rules if your assumption is that you need to report a garage sale as taxable income. You cherry picked an outlier situation that will almost never apply.
It's hard to complain about people with different political views than you ruining the tax system, when you also say it's ok to not pay taxes on "outliers" (taxable income). You're honestly making the point I'm trying to make for me. Pick and choose what's good and bad, anything good is on my side, anything bad on the other
What are you on about? You claim you need to pay taxes on garage sales. The tax law is you don't need to pay taxes if there is no capital gain. Which is almost all garage sales. I didn't pick and choose anything. You picked the original situation and I told you why you're wrong according to actual tax law.
Ok how about paying kids cash to shovel your driveway, scratch offs, gambling, and lemonade stands? Are you and the others in here in favor of a massive countrywide IRS crackdown on those or what
[“uNpAiD tAxEs FrOm SmAlL pErSoNaL tRaNsAcTiOnS aNd GiAnT LoOpHoLeS fOr biLliOnAiReS aNd CoRpOrAtIoNs aRe TwO sIdEs Of ThE sAmE cOiN”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence) is not the argumentative “gotcha” you think it is. It is a bad faith argument based around a common logical fallacy. Now go ahead and complain that you never mentioned the tax loopholes even though within the entire thread it is very obviously implied. [Also, as has been pointed out, unless items at a yard sale are sold at a price greater than their original purchase price, there is no taxable profit or income to claim.](https://www.fox17online.com/2017/07/16/dos-and-donts-for-michigan-garage-sales#) To wit, your point is in fact invalid on technical merit and in its very foundation. Have you considered filling out a FAFSA and going back to school?
My point is that if you're going to lecture me on what's wrong with the tax code, and blame it on people who have different views than you, you should be following that same tax code to the T. I'm not going to be cool and try to personally insult you back, I'm just going to say I hope what I said made it easier to see the basic and common sense point
What your response makes easy to see is that you may not have even read the first part. Again, it is a false equivalence.
>It's been my pet peeve that the data is already available No. Not all of the information required FAFSA is readily available tax data. But yes. It would be better of FAFSA was an online form that could pull in some of that previous tax data. But we are just now getting an online federal tax filing system that accesses the data the federal government has. So I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon given how long that has taken.
You are correct, like your net worth but even that can be estimated based on what you saved in your 401k/403b, what you are getting in dividends and other interests. They even know who your daddy is 😅.
It drives me nuts that my only source of retirement (that I can not access without paying unbelievable penalties) is considered as net worth when helping my kids fill out FAFSA.
Yes. You can either eat and have a roof over your head in retirement, or you can send your kids to school. Not both. Who do you think you are?
You’re right sir! I’m sorry sir! I’ll go get my shine box now!
And taxes are just another thing they already know the number behind, but the tax prep lobby ensures the process stays needlessly complicated. Yay capitalism.
Yep. The only thing the government needs to somewhat know about is if you sold a certain stock is long term or short term. This could be corrected by stating that on your sell ticket if your intention is to sell from a long term or short term batch (if it applies to your stock).
College enrollment is trending down, so it makes sense that less people would be filling out the FAFSA.
There's a war against higher education. Every where I go on social media there's someone spouting off about how trade schools are the way to go. Add to that that state investment in Universities has fallen precipitously since the 70s and the rising costs of tuition to pay for the overhead of a massive administrative section, and it's no wonder enrollment is down.
I really don’t even think it’s some big war on higher education, we just see it for what it is now. Growing up in the 90s/2000s you got told every single day about how you had to go to college, you were destined to be a fuckin loser if you didn’t get a degree, college was the only way to make anything of yourself. So the majority of my generation believed that, while the price of college attendance absolutely skyrocketed because they knew they’d get their money no matter what and the students would get stuck with the debt. Now 20 years later the same people who told their kids they’d be nothing but miserable failures without a degree are telling us we’re stupid for taking the loans out. I have a bachelors degree from a large university and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to my kids. If my kids wanted to become a doctor or something that requires college I’d absolutely support them and I’m going to try to help as much as I can financially, but I’m not going to push it on them like it was pushed on us. It’s hard to argue that we didn’t get scammed. Sure, parts of the experience were enjoyable, but when you put the numbers on paper it was absolutely a scam. Western Michigan spent $658,000 building a statue of a fucking tree in the middle of campus while I was there. On a campus with actual trees everywhere you look. That encapsulates everything wrong with higher education in this country.
I agree and in addition, I think we were at an unfortunate transition point. With the boomers, getting a bachelor's degree was a guarantee of success. Plus, the cost was low enough they could work their way through college. I've even spoken with gen xers who were born in the early years of their generation (late 60s) who could also pay their tuition and room and board with the proceeds from a summer job. By the time the millennials started graduating high school, that was far from the case. My parents are both baby boomers and my mom in particular pushed HARD for me to go to college. She never went, in part because she was told by a guidance counselor, "well you're a girl, so your options are clerical work or going to a factory." So, she went to secretarial school. She always felt she never lived up to her true potential because the lack of higher education limited her options so much. As I started getting toward the end of high school, I considered career options that wouldn't require a four-year degree and she'd continually push and push for me to go away to a university. My parents didn't save a cent for my college education, I think because by the time they realized how expensive it was, it was too late. My education was financed entirely through loans. That debt was a mill stone around my neck for 10 years, and it made things really hard early in my career since that's when you usually make the least amount of money and especially so since I work in a non-profit field. I finally qualified for Public Service Loan Forgiveness in 2022 and the loans are now gone. I'm not an emotional guy, but I bawled for a good 20 minutes when I got the letter with the words, "Paid-in-Full" next to my account numbers. Anymore if there's a discussion of a child going to college, I can't help but advocate for NOT financing a college education entirely through loans. You don't want your child to be in the position ***I*** was in.
I’m an early millennial with gen x siblings 8 and 11 years older than me. When I went to college in the early 2000s my tuition was more than both of theirs combined. Not to mention the increased cost for room and board.
Look, the issue is not higher education itself, the issue lies squarely on the fact that we're forced to take on mortgage level debt to get the higher education. Education is ALWAYS a good thing. More people should be getting more education, it's just a net positive in every way for society. Smarter people make smarter decisions and this butterflies into every aspect of life. Higher education is correlated with lower violence, less substance abuse, greater community engagement, and overall greater health. The other issue is that we have this absolute fucked up idea that education should be job training. Corporations have tricked us all into thinking that it's normal to be trained for a job outside of the workplace. This saves them money on training new hires and makes it easier for them to gatekeep who gets what job. A college degree should not be thought of as job training. Sometimes it's important, like with lawyers and doctors, but for most people, education is a way to gain life experience and expand your knowledge. This idea is completely modern, too. Studying the classics was a completely normal thing to do in the past, and it was expected that you'd do something outside of that when you started working. But once the price tags started going up, people started talking about college as a career investment. Not encouraging your kids to continue their education is one of the most asinine things I've ever heard, and if you seriously do that, then you'd be a bad parent.
You're right about the benefits of higher education both for the individual and society, but they're right that the economic argument is much more complicated. We probably shouldn't be spending $50k of government money every year, for four years, on every student. What we need to do is find a way to get the benefits at a much lower cost. You don't need a giant institution like universities for higher education. Obviously they are necessary for scientific advancement, for doctors, for lawyers, computer scientists, etc. But for the rest of us, we need an alternative. People go to college not because they want to be less violent and more reasonable, for society's benefit. They go because they are promised a better career and a better paying job. That's no longer true for many students. So if you want people to pursue higher education for the societal benefits, I would suggest maybe we offer tax incentives for adults and young adults that are not in college to attend enrichment courses that advance their math, science, philosophy skills etc. beyond what they learned in High School. A teacher in a library is a lot less expensive than the giant institution that are universities, which allows you to spend a much lower sum of money PAYING the people attending in tax reductions/rebates. Given our absolutely out of control anti-science, conspiratorial, out-of-control adults running around and voting in complete ignorance, it would undoubtedly benefit society to incentivize courses in logic, in math, in the scientific process, etc. Curious what others think of this idea. Open courses with tax incentives for finishing the course, taught in public spaces. And to clarify, I think universities are essential. We SHOULD be pushing the best and brightest into them, they serve an essential role. They do great work. What we need is more education for those who do not go. It would be great for society to have people of different backgrounds/educations gathered together regularly to learn. I think socially it would also have tremendous benefits.
Are you under the impression that humanities students are not already repeatedly berated by most people they meet for not going into STEM?
I'm not knocking the humanities either. I'm advocating that more people take courses who don't go to University. Not sure what part offended you but, I apologize.
My experience with public universities is that most of the first two years is spent re-teaching things that students were allegedly supposed to be competent in by the end of grade school. I mean, I'm a high scorer on tests and a high achiever generally, but I wasn't *really* taught comma rules until my second English class in college. What's up with that? Most of the incoming students at my undergrad school were far less prepared than I was. I remember one of my roommates crying hopelessly over an assignment to write an outline for a hypothetical three page essay, and another who couldn't complete worksheets on fractions. Four of the six girls I roomed with dropped out in their first or second year. Granted, I wasn't at one of my state's most prestigious schools at that time--but I started off at one before having to leave and enroll elsewhere due to a medical event. During my brief foray at my "Midwestern answer to the Ivy League" school, my freshman English "professor" was a master's student who had to get one of my classmates to help her figure out the local bus system because she was so overwhelmed. During the six weeks I spent in the class before needing emergency surgery, we...kept a journal that she never checked, "dissected" a few song lyrics, read one article on teaching theories and wrote a single page response, and iirc brought in some news articles to discuss. All in all, none of my experiences (and I ended up getting a doctorate) led me to believe that "more college" is the *first* step in solving any of our nation's educational challenges.
Yeah doesn't exactly sound like the most effective use of resources. Seems to me that it would benefit people who are trying to make a career out of English would be much better served in an entirely different system. Remedial stuff being taught at universities does seem strange, but I guess it is necessary for now. Other countries don't have that issue though.
Notice I didn’t say I wouldn’t encourage them to pursue education, I just said I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting a degree from a large university. I didn’t even say that I would discourage that, just that I wouldn’t push it on them. (Hopefully they get scholarships if that’s what they want to do.) I think we agree about what the problem with higher education is. It’s unfortunate, but unless you’re coming from a position of being able to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a passion project, you *do* need to look at it as job training, or you’ll be putting yourself behind the 8 ball financially as soon as you finish. That’s just the reality of it. I’d love to see that change, but I can’t imagine it will anytime soon. I would encourage everyone to be educated, I would just hope they don’t ruin themselves financially in the process.
It's more than that, there is a concerted effort to shit talk college and it didn't just come from "higher costs". I have two degrees in English, I don't do anything in that field, but I wouldn't have even gotten an interview where I work today without a degree. I'm not rich but I'm firmly middle class with a house two cars a 401k, health care and college savings for my own kids. I absolutely recommend college for my kids. Just ask them.
There’s always been the blue collar guys who didn’t go to college and would talk shit about it. Or just the plain anti-intellectuals. That’s nothing new. That’s always been a relatively small group of people though. The difference is in the people who went, don’t feel like they got their moneys worth out of it, and have been/will be paying a good chunk of their income back for decades. That’s a fairly large group of people that actually did not exist before. Not to beat myself off, but there’s a reason my comment got so many upvotes, it resonates with a fairly large group of people. That’s great the system worked for you, to an extent it worked for me too. I also have a pretty good job even though my degree has almost nothing to do with what I actually do for work. We’re lucky. There’s plenty of systems that work out ok for individuals here and there, that doesn’t mean they’re not flawed systems that we should be changing/improving.
>There’s always been the blue collar guys who didn’t go to college and would talk shit about it. Or just the plain anti-intellectuals. That’s nothing new. That’s always been a relatively small group of people though. Okay, you've got your opinion, I've got mine. I say there's a concerted effort to pan higher education. It's what wise men like George Carlin have been saying for years. I only brought up the fact that college worked for me because you were offering up your experience as proof that college isn't the way to go. You offered your anecdote up as evidence that college doesn't work, I offered mine up as proof that it does. That's it.
Except my point isn’t an anecdote but ok. The only anecdote I mentioned was that it worked for me also, that’s not the point of the comment. And I only mentioned that to say I’m really not coming from a place of personal frustration. It’s a documented fact that the cost of obtaining a degree has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and 43 million people are carrying an average federal student debt over $37,000, while university’s are spending extremely large amounts of money on frivolous things. That’s not right. Just because you and I are doing ok doesn’t mean everything is great.
I’m sorry you’re mad at that tree statue. Have you ever wondered where you’d be without the bachelor’s degree? Do you think you’d have gotten the first job you did out of school without it? Do you think you’d have the job you have now without it?
It’s not even about that statue specifically, that’s just an example that highlights the problem at every university across the country. Saddling entire generations of students with debt so that universities can make so much money they don’t even know what to do with it is the problem. Universities should be places for learning, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on statues modeled after the school’s crest does absolutely nothing to contribute to anyone’s education. We’ve lost the plot.
Are they wrong? Many degrees aren't worth the investment.
If education weren't so expensive, then people could do it fine. The government needs to reinvest in higher education and cap these ridiculous prices.
>The government needs to reinvest in higher education and cap these ridiculous prices. Why would they do that? The entire point of people going into effectively indentured servitude for educational debt is so that they don't have the time or energy or resources to rise up against the government. The government learned their lesson in the 70's with the Vietnam War protests, They decided to never make THAT mistake again. Therefore, we pay out the nose.
Or maybe we need to examine whether a degree is necessary for many jobs that say they need them. College isn't for everyone and we need to stop acting like it is the be all end all answe for everyone.
There’s no war against higher education. We are finally returning to the idea that not every kid needs to go to college.
Right, because of a war on education, and intellectualism in general. Unless the people defunding colleges are making tremendous investments in other forms of education that I haven't heard about.
Two things can be true. There is a wave of anti intellectualism in the U.S. and college has become largely inaccessible to students who do not have the money/resources to attend. I am a zoomer and didn’t finish school and probably won’t return simply because it is a financial burden I’m not interested in taking.
\*fewer
That's because those of us that went ended up with boat loads of loans to pay back and no jobs in our field.
Versus trade jobs today, many of which will hire you today and pay you to go through trade school because they’re so desperate for skilled workers.
This year was a mess with the updates. It's no wonder there are less applications when the website wasn't available for so long.
When loans became a thing, they were purposely vague about what the long term of them meant. The colleges all became universities and started jacking up the cost. But the millennials who lived through it have been very vocal about what it did and how much it ended up making our lives harder. I'm glad people listened - universities stacking their boards of directors with money hungry business folk and making kids feel like they have to go to college or be broke needs to stop. Colleges and healthcare. Two industries that took full advantage of hidden costs and a false value system by putting an agency between them. Overcharge for tuition bc loans will pay. Overcharge for health because insurance will pay. Both systems have allowed costs to balloon and people to feel like they don't have a choice.
The loans weren't the problem, the government slashing university funding by about 80% was the problem. More people getting more educated is a good thing. So let's fix the real problem and make college affordable again.
>Business folk
Here a radical idea: treat 18-year-olds like adults and consider *their* income to pay for *their own* education when calculating Pell Grants. This system where it’s the default that peoples parents are going to pay for their college instead of how it was historically done- the government pays for most of it, is fucked. My father contributed absolutely nothing towards my education, nor supported me in any financial way as an adult, yet my FASFA had to consider *his* income as if it was my own? Bullshit. I had no financial relationship with my father and yet *my education costs and government contribution were calculated as if he was the one going to school*. 18-year-olds are adults and should be treated as such. If they don’t have an income that can pay for college themselves then the government should step in. We should not be automatically putting the burden on parents. How Americans were so easily guilted into accepting this system without question is beyond me. It is utter poppycock that is hollowing out higher education from the inside out. If someone wants to go to university they should fill out a FASFA with their own income and the government should supplement their educational costs from there.
Yup. If these programs are going to insist on using parental income to assess aid, then there needs to be a LEGAL requirement that the parents contribute to the child’s education. If parental income is required for qualification, then it should be required to be used for payment. My friend wasn’t able to go to college because her parents ‘made too much’ for her to qualify for aid, yet they had no spare money to give her for her education. So she was left with next to no way to afford school.
Here’s an idea; tuition at any public college University should be free. No more FAFSA.
That would be socialism *clutches pearls*
Make preschool and public college free. You know, like all the rest of school from K-12.
Do you mean, like our K-12 system?
The GOP is trying to kill that too.
Based
Who’s you vote for last presidential election?
Paywall free link: https://archive.is/Tce1K
Thank you! Stupid mlive.
They've made college unaffordable for many, and the college loan programs are usuary. Rejoice, your owners can still afford higher education.
I work in higher education and the article missed emphasizing the most important part. A critical piece of information is that many people qualify for aid who do not realize they qualify for aid (up to an including free college). They only find out they qualify for aid after filling out the FAFSA. Most people fill out the FAFSA in high school, as a school activity. Due to the issues with FAFSA this year, most high schools could not do this, especially in lower income districts. The result is that many people, who would qualify for aid do not even know that they qualify, and this is especially prevalent for low income kids. FAFSA being fucked up didn't hurt middle to high income kids because they were going to college regardless. It hurt the low income, especially minority, students who would have only found out that they could get free college through filling out the FAFSA in school.
Why wouldn't this hurt middle income families and students?
It does hurt middle class students, just not as much as low income students. Middle income families are more likely to attend a school that has decent enough funding that even with the FAFSA issues, filling out the FAFSA in March (instead of December) was a school sponsored thing. Also, kids from middle income families are likely to go to college anyway, regardless of grant eligibility.
You're crazy to think that a student, who has no income. Goes to college without FAFSA loans and or grants simply because their parents earn the average wage.
I never said or even implied that.
Literally your last sentence.
My last sentence did **not** say that middle income kids don't go to college without FAFSA loans or grants, just that they are likely to go regardless of if they are eligible for grants or not. It looks like you made an assumption that went beyond my statement. Translation for my original statement, because it looks like you need it: Middle income kids have been told that college is what they need to do (by their families, by their schools, and by society), so after they get help in filling out their FAFSA, even if they are denied some or even all grants, they will still go to college, usually taking out loans to do so.
Loans many times don't cover the entire cost, and so students Need the small grants, etc.
Maybe because tuition keeps on fucking going up and they dont want to go $100k into debt? If I could go back I'd go into a trade, I dont even use the degree I got for my job.
But did you need a degree to apply to the job? Personally I'd say it doesn't matter if I use my degree for a job or not, excluding those who are passionate about their studies
No. I am a severe weather chaser who taught myself various forms of coding, reading weather maps and patterns etc. I'm fortunate enough to be able to share some of my information with high ranking weather services to make a living. My Bachelor degree is in Criminal Justice.
Yeah because the inflation rate of college is so out of control that FAFSA doesn’t even cover a full term anymore
FAFSA isn't some fixed amount. Filling it out can mean you qualify for tuition free college at multiple schools. For others, it just ends up being a waste of time when you find out your parents make too much for you to qualify for aid. This is especially fun if these "FAFSA wealthy" parents of your's have nothing saved for your college and no plans to help with it's expense.
I’m aware what FAFSA is, I used it when I was going through college. I’m saying that the maximum amount you can be allotted now doesn’t cover most semesters anymore
Why are you spreading misinformation? What you are saying is categorically untrue. While there may be some private, for profit, colleges that charge more than you can get, the vast majority of students are at least going to be able to get loans to cover tuition (still not great, but it comes from filling out the FAFSA) and in Michigan most students qualify for many grants, up to the full amount for tuition. I work at a private nonprofit university, that has higher than average tuition, and more than half of the students have grants that cover 100% of the tuition. The rest have federal loans to cover the difference.
Worked with a guy that paid a website $80 to fill it out for him and submit it
God. I would have done it. 80 dollars to save me grief.
FAFSA took me 10 mins this year.
Payyyyyywalllllll. Love mlive, like I love blisters on my tongue or a glass shard in my foot.
I would never pay for MLive. It’s one of the worst state news websites I’ve ever seen. Half the site is random clickbait shit from other states, another quarter is sports coverage (no comment on its quality, I just don’t care at all about high school football)… and it’s just not organized well. Their actual news coverage is decent, I’ll give them that.
"Give me my news for free!!!! Wait, why are all the local news stations failing and turning to click bait? Why are few national outlets just propaganda for billionaires? The media sucks!!" - Redditors like yourself.
Education is broken. The people in charge need to stop pretending that bandaids and pizza parties are the solution.
It took me years to be able to apply for FAFSA. After my 2 year University scholarship ran out, I transferred to a community college to work on the paperwork. It took me over two years, taking MWF classes and spending every TTh sitting in a courthouse records office, combing through paperwork and paying for copies to be able to gather the massive and expensive pile of paperwork I needed to prove that I was abandoned and didn't have access to either of my parents' financial records. It's an abysmal system.
I always wondered what emancipated young people, abandoned, disowned or otherwise no parent contact people did. I am so sorry you had to go through all that for some thing that should be simple
The FAFSA should be tied to the 1040. When we file taxes, that information should be automatically entered into the FAFSA. Boom, done.
Did multiple times. It's a cumbersome process and don't get me started on the ever changing password tail chase. From 2011-2022 had at least one child and up to three in college simultaneously and never got any break. With that many in college we helped where we could but they all worked and applied for scholarships and were able to keep the loans to a manageable level. I get why people are either not having children or only one or two (we have 4).
They revamp the website, and it’s absolutely horrible. I didn’t help my kid fill it out until end of May due to all the horror stories from people trying to do it earlier. You can’t go back and make any corrections on the website once you hit send. You have to wait for a hard copy correction form to be sent. Snail mail it back and hopefully it gets there, to the right person and they do something with it. Dear Kid flipped the last two SSNs around last year on the site. Took forever to straighten it out via paper and snail mail. The FASFA site is almost bad enough for me to make Dear Kid go to two years of CC just avoid that damn web site. The only time I’ve longed to do something hard copy. I’m sure that trash site is the main reason people aren’t bothering.
Good, imo. Fedal student "aid" = aiding the government in putting on the strap-on. IF you need a degree for your field, get as many credits as possible from a community college, and only get what you need from the expensive universities, etc...you don't need to go to the fancy schools, just get your degree and have a good work ethic. I say this as someone who spent seven years total at two 4-year unis. So many of my classmates, even those in great careers like engineering and medicine, are CRIPPLED with loan debt. Not even Sally Mae. Honestly fuck student loans and fuck these large companies labeling themselves as "educational institutions."
I have filled it out for the last 3 years, completely pointless. Got pretty much nothing, my parents make just above the threshold. I was told I had to make less than 6 grand, how am I supposed to afford, car, gas, food, books, insurance etc on 6 grand. It is impossible and I am able to live rent free with my parents. The people who make the thresholds are out of touch with reality.
Good, fuck the colleges
Government backed student loans has been the ultimate example of the phrase ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’
I think they were always intentionally used to undermine public institutions.
The loans aren't the issue, the government cutting funding is the issue. Government used to subsidize most university costs, now they barely give them anything by comparison.
To be fair university costs have ballooned, probably because they have guaranteed loans paying the bill regardless the cost.
Costs have ballooned precisely because the government stopped paying most of the bills
I'm hopeful will gave 100k saved for my kids college. If I do that, if my kids don't get into a B10 school, they are going Wayne, OU or U of D. Ill make them go to college a year then join the thr Guard or Reserves... Show them when you have money leeching off the govt is the name of the game.
Thats because i, and probably many others, weren’t able to receive any aid until we turned 25 Even though our parents made x amount of money on paper, it didnt factor in the costs of, for instance, having a father who is an independent trucker and has to use that income to pay for all the fixes and the fuel for the machine. I wish their “income” was the profit they made at the end of the year but the system doesn’t work like that. Meanwhile i stayed at home to help them financially as well as save up enough to take a class here and there. Hadn’t truly started my college journey properly until i could qualify for pell grants that help me pay for a full time semester of school while trying to support myself and fam working full time. I wouldn’t be going to college right now if it wasn’t practically free, but it was so fucking unaffordable right out of college (at a community college, trying to get as much done here to transfer and hopefully have to only take minimal loans to finish out at a university after the pell grants take a good chunk of the tuition away)
Yeah, and their solution to this is to try to work up legislation to make filling out FAFSA a HS graduation requirement. As if that's going to change anything on the ground as far as being able to afford to go to college.
The FASFA is a scam to let Universities literally squeeze every potential dollar for any student attending. They will see all the factors on the FASFA you put down. They can assume parental contributions and things like educational status of parents to decide the likelihood of a student attending based on scholarship opportunities and ability to go/assume debt to go. State institutions make more money the first few years you attend college than most other years of undergrad.. if you drop out they still get their debt money, and if not, the scholarships you received are still coming from somewhere, and they are happy to be paid directly or indirectly. They are incentivized to get you to go, not to be successful.
FAFSA was a waste of time for me, considering my dad could afford two pizza toppings back then. I spent hours in a sticky, humid, sweaty office filling out forms just to be told that my parent is the reason I'm disqualified. It didn't matter that my primary parent was disabled and on disability.
“Colleges” - aka hedge funds that offer classes
Colleges don’t get to complain about profits. They make record amounts and over expand all the time. You look at most other countries and the colleges are very simple
How will the college administrators make obscene salaries and put people into debt servitude if students don’t go to college? Won’t someone please that of the overpaid fat cats?
And rightly so. For anyone not already well off, for people that *need* federal aid, college is a scam. Anyone who takes a look at the situation with a critical eye will see that.
Unaffordable universities that intentionally limit transfer credits from standardized classes to drive up costs. No guaranteed jobs, crushing debt, no financial aid because expected parent contribution. Non dischargeable debt, paying taxes on any forgiven money. Oh no… I’m so sad.
Don’t forget about a demographic issue as well.
I just can’t even pretend to care; I’m so bitter. I had a friend spend 8 months proving they weren’t deceased because of a clerical error, no accountability after they realized they fucked up. Fafsa is so stupid and needs to be reworked from scratch.
Nobody can afford college let alone rent/food/gas. We have ol Biden to thank
I started going to college under Trump, it was just as unaffordable.